Not really, of course, the idea is beautiful, but it’s very hard to find someone. I’m incredibly shy and scared of rejection, so I hardly, if ever, have the guts to ask someone out, and the one or two times I have have been less then good.

And don’t even get me started on the whole “It’ll happen to you, just wait” thing. So annoying. I’m 28, have been in 1 relationship, got dumped on the evening before my birthday, so yeah. I’m waiting.

Side note: Sorry for turning half this blog into a whine thing. Woops.

And I know it’s my fault.

I don’t go out, I don’t meet people. And when I do it’s people miles away I see maybe once a year if lucky.

All I know in this place is family, and if they e-mail/text/whatever me to do stuff, it’s a miracle.

I wish I was normal. No hassle in meeting people. Not feeling shy and amazingly insecure about everything I do.

It feels like I’m living wrong, in a way.

I’m also really shy, so that doesn’t help. I don’t make friends at all, really. Do not Autistics have an easier time at this?

Jude asked me to write an article about the idea that all autistic people like comics. This request triggered a whole bunch of questions in me.
Of course not every autistic person loves comics. Every autistic person is different and an individual. Yes, we have some things in common, but we also have different personalities. Still, it’s a stereotype that autistics are also geeks*. However, as with a lot of stereotypes it does have a certain degree of truth in it, at least for me.

I mean, Youri, Jude and myself are geeks, my boyfriend, who we suspect is autistic and is currently in a diagnostic phase, is a geek. I know several people online who are autistic and geek. My dad who is also suspected autistic… is a geek. Coincidence? Perhaps it’s just that I know a lot of geeks, of which a few happen to be autistic. I’m not saying it is true, far from it, but for me personally it just happens to be that there is a strong connection.

Are autistic people more attracted to science fiction and fantasy? Are science fiction and fantasy worlds as real to us as the normal world? And if so, is it because we have an equally hard time understanding both of them? Is a SF/fantasy world easier to understand because characters and situations are magnified or simplified in comparison to the real world? Do we find solace in the characters that are different from ‘normal’ people?

How do you view this topic? Do you see a connection between geeks and autism, or is it a ridiculous notion to you?

*by geek I don’t mean comicgeek in particular. Just someone who’s into SF and Fantasy.

I detailed what it was like to have a sensory disorder in this update and I’ve mentioned it before. You can find entries with the tag here.

I mention this because eye contact, for me, has a lot to do with this package of issues.

Have you ever accidentally looked in the direction of a torch/flashlight when someone shines it at you and immediately looked away because of the pain to your eyes? That’s what it feels like looking at someone directly in his or her eyes. The amount of empathy I feel when looking at someone’s eyes overwhelms me. His or her direct gaze feels like someone shining a light in my face.

This is the reason I glance away and back again repeatedly. I’ve seen others bob or shake their heads. I’ve also seen people who have mastered this and have no issues whatsoever looking someone in the eye.

Occasionally, in the past, people have said “Look me in the eye when I’m talking to you” or guided my face to look at theirs (yes, even as an adult). In these instances if I’m already upset, this is the point of no return. I go into full-on melt down and will shout or smack someone’s hands away from me. If I’m not already upset when someone says this to me, I typically walk away so that I don’t become further upset. This is my go-to when overwhelmed. It keeps me from melting down and doing things I regret later. No one likes to lose control. I say rude things, or smack people who attempt to touch me and it’s not acceptable. I don’t want to become that person. It’s embarrassing, which makes me even angrier.

What’s important to note is that from time to time I meet someone who has been taught to maintain eye contact despite this sensory disorder. More likely than not they were taught from a very young age that good things happened when they maintained good eye contact. Instead of it becoming negative when they didn’t, they were rewarded when they tried. This is likened to allowing your eyes to get used to light, or your skin get used to warm water.

I don’t particularly have an opinion on this method. It works for some people and it doesn’t work for others. If you have an experience with this, please contact me, because I’d love to hear how it worked out for you and what your opinion of it is.

That’s just insulting.

They also seem to be all about curing Autism. It’s a can of worms, really, and I can see both sides of the argument. My personal opinion is this. You are who you are. There’s no curing Autism.

Unfortunately they also have an army of celebrity supporters, so they won’t be going away soon.

And, as far as I know, and so this could be wrong, they keep the vaccine causes Autism myth alive, endangering kids who won’t be vaccinated because parents are afraid they may be Autistic.

I have no issues with an organization speaking with Autism. I especially want to single out Autism Self Advocacy Network, but then, they’re basically all about the individual rights of Autistic people, and run by them.

The thing is, if you really are for making life better for Autistics/Aspergers, you have to work on Education, Acceptance, etc. Wanting to cure people just freaks them out, and makes them dislike you.

But here we go.

I’m quite annoyed by me. I don’t go out, I don’t do anything (Well, go to Artfly to make drawings and stuff 4 times a week), aside from devoting most of my life to trying to give my brother an okay life. Which is not easy.

I don’t do concerts, though I want to, I don’t do bars, though I want to, the best I get is a Dublin weekend last weekend of September, and maybe a week at my sister’s in November for ThoughtBubble.

Youri – OUT.

“The sun hurts,” was something I regularly said as a child. I was outdoors frequently and used to the sun hurting my skin and eyes, but sometimes it would become so insufferable that it was like being kicked in the forehead from the inside, or as though my skin was going to fry off.

“My clothes hurt,” was another one that got plenty of head-turns. I believe what I was aiming to say was, “my clothes are hurting me.” I feel my clothes on my body at all times, meaning that I can never disregard that I’m wearing clothes. They touch me incessantly and some fabrics feel like steel wool against an unhealed wound. My mother always had to turn my socks inside out and clip the hems when I was a child. You would think that I would be okay with being bare-foot if that was the case, but I’m not. I am virtually never without socks or shoes on as it’s worse when I can feel objects touching my feet that aren’t meant to touch them. I feel the texture of the floor on my feet and can map it in my head, visually, without looking at it. I sense dust and dirt stabbing at my feet like daggers. I suppose that this is why I walked on my toes as a child. To this day when I walk in socks, I “tip-toe;” On occasion even if I am wearing shoes I do this.

The final portion of the picture wasn’t something I vocalised until I was an adult: I hear everything equally. When someone is speaking to me, I don’t simply hear them speaking– I hear the carpet chafing against their shoes. I hear air pressure fluctuations, or wind. I hear cars outside. I hear clothes moving against bodies. I hear breathing. I hear keys in your pocket. I hear your hands rubbing against themselves. I hear grass moving at times.

You hear all of these things as well, but a neuro-typical brain filters them out as “ambience.” When I watch films or television, the ambient music and noise require me to use captions; otherwise I won’t hear what is being spoken clearly. I got use to this at a young age and learned to fill in the spaces of what I missed. I learned behaviours to make it seem as though I was taking in merely the “important” sounds. Your voice is not more significant to my brain than the sound of the wind; thus, it’s all the same to me. The beauty of this is that wind sounds like your voice. It has just as many complexities as the sounds you construct. I wish everyone heard the wind like I hear it. In my head it looks like van Gogh’s starry night—segments joined into a whole, dancing chorus.

Society constructs a hierarchy of the importance of certain sounds. I have learned the broad make up of this pyramid, but that does nothing to aid me. It’s like seeking to repair a part of a car that doesn’t exist and never did.

Fortunately, I have people in my life who recognise this. They don’t mind repeating things when I ask. They never get angry and ask me to pay better attention—like some of the teachers I’ve had in the past. The downside to this is that I worry that others feel less significant because my brain doesn’t discern their sounds from other sounds.

I’m grateful that I have a family and friends who aren’t affronted when I leave the room without saying anything. It isn’t exceptional for me to become overwhelmed in everyday circumstances because of this sensory overload. Speaking to you while the television is on can put my brain into a tailspin of anxiety. When this transpires, my first and only thought is “get out, get out, get out, get out, please remove yourself from this situation.” The last thing on my mind is “would it be rude to leave right now?”

I recognise that this comes off as snobby, rude, or thoughtless. However, if you have someone in your life who does this, please bear in mind how inconsiderate it may be to subject them to your standards. If this is something you haven’t spoken about with them, feel free to bring it up, but also know that it might not change anything at all.

I’m happy to have people who accept me and understand that this is not an affront against them, but others aren’t as fortunate.

I hope this helps someone. A special thank you to S, J, R, & C for helping me form this in my mind last night and for knowing how important this is.

I wasn’t one of those 80′s kids who had a television for a babysitter and I strongly advocate reading at a young age, so people are a little startled when I tell them that television can be a great tool for relating to the world around you.

From the time I was very small, my parents exposed me to outdoor playtime. When I was 7, I was allowed to play in the back yard by myself. I was fascinated by the neighbourhood around me. From my back garden I could see clear down the row of houses and into other people’s gardens, but what interested me most was a soft depression in the shape of a dinosaur bone. I started digging extremely carefully, trying desperately to hold back my excitement. I was going to be famous like Indiana Jones. I ran inside to tell my parents who were unimpressed that I had dug up that hole they had filled in from the dog’s last excavation project.

Despite my outdoor lifestyle, which lasted the entirety of my childhood and waned as I grew into a teen, television was still a large part of my life. On average I watched perhaps 3 hours of television a week. On Saturday mornings, that meant Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was always Leonardo.

However, what really interested me was science and I learned science from television. I watched shows like Beakman’s World on TLC, shows on PBS, and occasionally fiction. My parents let me watch Doogie Howser M.D. once a week, for 30 minutes, in the evenings when new episodes came on. I wanted to be him when I grew up. To me, he was the cool kid. At this point in my life, gender didn’t mean much to me. Doogie was a person, and so was I. I could easily be Doogie, and no one could tell me otherwise. At the end of most of the episodes, Doogie would sit down at his computer and write an entry into a diary. I was enthralled. I loved the way he wrote his thoughts, and I was in awe with the summation of a complete story in a few short sentences.

Likewise, there was another television show I was allowed to watch once a week: Star Trek: The Next Generation. Captain Picard also had a diary, which he called a log. He kept his thoughts organised with a computer as well. Picard was unlike anyone I had ever met, or seen on television. He was a new kind of person, and incredibly alien to me. He had a complex vocabulary, a manner that commanded respect, and yet he conveyed compassion. He was an upgrade from Leonardo.

Investigating who I am, I sometimes forget the grand impression television has had on me. The characters I grew to love and respect were characters in which I took vital pieces from. From Doogie I took genius, compassion, and the importance of friendship no matter how different you were. From Picard I took leadership, exploration, and an endearment to diversity.

There’s a character I’ve intentionally left out.

Throughout my childhood (and sometimes even today) I always felt like an alien. I would lie awake at night and imagine that a spaceship would come for me. It wasn’t a fantasy of a different family–it was a fantasy of having a role in society. The aliens would tell me they needed me.

Even as a child I knew I would never be what I considered a productive member of the world. I knew I was odd, and I thought I was a bad person for it. How could I be a human being without that x-factor that made a life form a person?

This conflict continues into my adult years, but what got me through my childhood and made me feel less like a failure and more like a valuable “person” was another person I saw on television: Data.

Data was an android. Sometimes people called him “what” or “that” instead of “who” or “him.” I could identify with that. Kids knew I was weird, and sometimes would call me “it” instead of “she” or “her.” I remember watching Picard argue for Data’s right to live as a person. Though it was more dramatic than my situation, it did not feel any different. The alienation I felt as a child was still present, but for an hour a week I watched Data become human, and knew I would be human one day, too.

My point is: let your kids watch television every once in a while. Don’t make it the centrepiece for their lives but also don’t be afraid of your child delving “too far” into the world of fiction.

The truth we find in fiction is the most personal and profound truth we can give ourselves.

Feel free to check in on the conversation, but remember to keep it “I have autism and this is how I feel,” rather than “I know autists and this is how I think they feel.”

Thanks to Captain Awkward for the opportunity for us to help the Letter Writer. It was our pleasure.

Feel free to contact either of us about anything we said, or what we didn’t say!